Rambling Rhodes

Fire Drill

During my first year of college, I had a dorm room entirely to myself. It was a harsh introduction to the realities of living on my own, such as it was, because I had no idea what it meant to decorate and furnish my own living space.

I'm a utilitarian kind of guy. I don't do aesthetics. My idea of decorating is, well, a picture of a tiger charging the camera. I've always basically kind of relied on whatever girl I happened to be dating to make decorating decisions, a philosophy that worked well provided I had a girlfriend.

Therefore, for pretty much my entire college career--and, trust me, it was a career--my wall decorations consisted almost entirely of posters of expensive sports cars I could never afford, and impossibly seductive women in varying stages of undress who I could never expect to sleep with. Oh, and I had a poster of Bruce Lee, too, which I can't really explain beyond the fact he's the toughest guy who ever died.

On the furniture end of things, I basically made use of whatever was available to me. During that first year of dorm life, for example, the school provided me with a really crappy single bed, a crappier desk, and an oh-so-crappy dresser featuring a chipped mirror. For me, of course, this constituted Martha Stewart living, and this was before Martha Stewart was even a household (or prisonhold) name.

At any rate, that first year of dorm life was a pretty spartan existence. The few women that I was able to entice into my room were less than impressed by my decorating prowess, and the general consensus was that any sex was to be done with the lights out so they didn't have to look at Nicole Eggert striking a seductive pose alongside another poster of an unknown female with fantastically large and dark areolas.

Anyway, all of this is entirely beside the point of this post. Well, mostly.

Towards the end of that first college year, there was a rash of incidences wherein some dorm students thought it was funny to set off the fire alarm. During a couple of weeks in the early spring, it was practically a nightly exercise to have the fire alarm tripped, requiring all dorm residents to shuffle out into the early spring air in our jammies at 2 or 3 a.m. Typically, it took about an hour for the fire department to give the all-clear, which was time that would have been much better spent sleeping.

The fire drill joke was funny the first two or three times, because there was a certain amount of fascination in scanning the pajama-bedecked females and ascertaining which ones were affected most prominently by the chilly early spring air.

But, after about the third fire drill, even checking out hard female nipples largely lost its appeal. After all, there was sleep to be had.

So, I hatched a plan.

My dorm room featured a fairly large closet, and it dawned on me one morning, after enduring the latest fire alarm prank, that it was large enough to lay down in, if I so chose to do so. So, after class that afternoon, I set about making a little nest of sorts in my closet. It was pretty comfortable and, with a little ingenuity involving a couple of towels, I was able to set up a sort of curtain that hid my nest entirely.

Sure enough, two nights later, some jackhole set off a bunch of firecrackers in the hallway, and the billowing smoke went and tripped the fire alarm. I dragged myself out of bed and went into my closet, where I made myself nice and comfortable in my nest and drew the towel curtain, hiding me completely from view.

On cue, the resident assistant used his dorm key to enter my room to ensure I had evacuated, and he checked my closet as well. But, thanks to my excellent curtain camoflage, I went undetected.

I utilized my closet nest several times over the following weeks, until they finally started cracking down on the idiots who kept tripping the alarm.

I guess, in retrospect, the whole thing could have backfired on me and I could have been burned alive in the event of a real fire.

But, at least I would have been well-rested in the after-life.

In other news Luciana Salazar is hot. I like to see Luciana Salazar. A Luciana Salazar would be pretty awesome. Mmm, Luciana Salazar.

Posted by Ryan at June 29, 2004 10:30 AM